Home educating families from across Dorset will be descending on Parliament on Saturday 8th March as part of a national action to raise awareness and protest against the Children’s wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The Bill is currently progressing through parliament with haste and seeks to impose mandatory registration on home educators, along with much more involvement and oversight from the state. Spearheaded by MP Bridget Phillipson, the Bill has come under fire from several groups and organisations who have obtained legal opinion confirming that elements of the bill could be unlawful.
Key points that home educators are challenging are:
– Consent to withdraw certain children from school – including those subject to s47 enquiries. This undermines parental responsibility, is open to abuse and could leave children, for example those with mental health difficulties, at serious risk of harm.
– Level of data requested and held on the register is unsafe – The ICO states that cyber attacks on local authority systems have ‘increased staggeringly’, rising by almost a quarter between 2022 and 2023. Education accounts for nearly 80% of all cyber attacks.
– The bill provides no recourse for home educators when they are treated unfairly.
– Unprecedented powers granted to council officials, including the ability to issue a ‘School Attendance Order’ on the basis that it is their ‘opinion’ that a child would be better off in school, regardless of how exceptional the home education provision may be.
Those behind the bill site the heartbreaking case of Sara Sharif as justification for the proposed new measures, stating that this will identify ‘hidden children’ and stop children ‘falling through the cracks’, though many feel that this is a distraction from the real issue as Sara was on the radar of children’s services but they failed to act. The Victoria Climbie Foundation said ‘VCF, along with academics and other organisations, raised serious concerns when the last government put forward similar measures and we are disappointed that these have not been listened to.
Sara, like Victoria, was not hidden. Indeed for Sara the ongoing violence of her family was known to authorities from before she was born and throughout her life.
Sara would not have been helped by measures to place restrictions on children in child protection plans or under s47 investigations being withdrawn from school as the local authority had decided she was not in need of protection. If they had recognised her plight, then even without this bill the local authority has these existing powers. The local authority will also have known that she had been withdrawn from school, given the existing robust requirements on schools to inform them.
This is not the ‘gap’ through which children fall and this is not how we shall help them. We have to ask ourselves why children who are known to children’s services are not able to be helped.
Saturday 8th March 11-3pm Locations nationwide.
